Syria’s crisis

Picking up the pieces

The opposition struggles to respond to the regime’s offensive

REFUGEES crossing the Lebanese border came bearing tales of slaughter. After rebel fighters withdrew from the Baba Amr district of Homs, Syria's third-largest city, on March 1st, President Bashar Assad's militiamen moved in. Those who escaped, mainly women and children, say security agents rounded up the menfolk at checkpoints. At least two families had their throats slashed by loyalists with knives. Yet the full extent of civilian casualties may never be known, since Mr Assad's men blocked Red Cross convoys from reaching Baba Amr.

Syria's suffering is not limited to Homs. Even as mopping up operations continued there, government forces shelled the nearby city of Rastan and half a dozen other towns. Activists who smuggle medicine into the country and the injured out are finding their networks disrupted. Avaaz, an international online campaigning group that sponsors some 200 “citizen journalists” inside Syria, says some areas have become information black holes.

Yet the pattern during the year-long revolt has been for areas crushed by government forces to rebound as soon as they leave. Less robust in the face of regime offensives has been the political opposition. The Free Syrian Army, the rebels' loosely banded fighting force, says it retreated from Baba Amr to spare civilian lives after almost a month of artillery fire. Yet it admits that its lightly armed men had run out of ammunition.

Some among Mr Assad's diverse opponents advocate building a well-equipped and organised rebel army to confront the regime. Burhan Ghalioun, the professorial leader of the Syrian National Council, the main opposition group in exile, has pledged to oversee and organise the rebels, but not to equip them. Other members have accused the council of half-hearted support and set up a splinter group to lobby for supplies of powerful weapons. “We won't secure enough to outgun the regime's forces, but we can increase the cost for them,” says Fawaz Tello, one of the group's founding members.

Others are wary of the bloodshed likely to follow from an uneven fight. They want instead to convince Russia, whose vetoing of UN Security Council resolutions has emboldened the regime to carry on killing, to turn against Mr Assad. They hope that after Kofi Annan, the newly appointed UN and Arab League envoy to Syria, goes to Damascus on March 10th he will formulate a transition plan that can win Russia over. But they have done little to pave the way for wider talks, for instance by reassuring ethnic and religious minorities that back the regime because they fear the mainly Sunni resistance.

The dissidents like to boast of their acumen, but would-be helpful foreign governments as well as protesters inside Syria are tiring of a council that has proved opaque, indecisive and politically naive. In a sign of growing tension between the political and military men, the Free Syrian Army's self-appointed leader, Riyad al-Asaad (whose own authority is questioned), ruled out working with the council's new military committee. And as the Free Syrian Army is revealed as a ragtag bunch of local groups rather than a nationwide organisation, even vocal supporters of arming them, such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, appear loth to send weapons in.

Mr Assad's exiled opponents may be scrappy, but those on the ground are making progress. Large swathes of Syria, including parts of Homs and suburbs of the capital, Damascus, have in effect seceded from the central state. Numerous neighbourhood committees have united into town councils. Local leaders with more clout than bickering dissidents are helping to keep control and contain the level of internecine violence. They cannot prevent Mr Assad from having the upper hand militarily, but they are further eroding his shrinking political authority. One sign of this was the defection, on March 7th, of Syria's deputy oil minister, Abdo Hussameldin. He is the highest-ranking official yet to abandon the regime.